the hereafter
by patriciaselina
Summary: The four times Li Kouyuu falls in love with Kou Shuurei, and the four times Kou Shuurei will never understand why Li Kouyuu is the way he does. One-shot  one-sided  Kouyuu/Shuurei, Ryuuki/Shuurei hinted, spoilers for the anime, manga, and light novels.


**Title:** _the hereafter_

**Series:** Saiunkoku Monogatari – Color Cloud Palace

**Characters: **Li Kouyuu, Kou Shuurei, Shi Ryuuki, mentions of many others

**Rating: **PG13 to be safe

**Genre: **Drama/Angst/Romance. Of _course. _With special emphasis on the Angst, since this is one-sided love, after all.

**Warnings: **OOC-ness. Inaccuracies. Nonsensicality. Song lyrics (again). Very weird experimental writing style. My misunderstanding about what Shuurei really is. Disturbing images at the end (sort of, since Eros and Thanatos love deals with death). And of course, I do not own any of the songs. Or the characters. As usual.

**Notes: **Based on the four kinds of love usually portrayed in literature (I saw this on tumblr, by the way) – "erotic" love (actually, love at first sight, or so the description says), transcendent love (idealizing the one you love, putting them on a pedestal), banal love (loving another in spite of their faults), and Eros and Thanatos love (a love based on the awareness of death, obviously the hardest one to write). As is my style, this is a series of interconnected drabblets.

**Summary: **The four times Li Kouyuu falls in love with Kou Shuurei, and the four times Kou Shuurei will never understand why Li Kouyuu is the way he does. One-shot (one-sided) Kouyuu/Shuurei, Ryuuki/Shuurei hinted, spoilers for the anime, manga, and light novels.

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><p><strong>for the first time. <strong>_saying things we haven't for a while_

Their first meeting is by no means a conventional one.

For one, she is already married, albeit in title only, to the Emperor himself no less; he is a self-proclaimed misogynist, with an apparent dislike for the weaker sex and all its fragility. But there is something about those brown eyes that behold a woman to be respected, not trodden down upon; a woman who stands up for her beliefs and does not stay in the silence, forever unheard. There is that, and there is the hand with which she thrusts the steaming white bun his direction; it is not a lady's hand, for it is roughened by scratches and calluses, weathered down by work but bearing a strength that normal heiresses' hands could never hope to possess.

She is one of the most beautiful women he has ever seen – he denies himself numerous things, but he will not deny himself that. Dark hair tied up with a sparkling myriad of ornaments, cheeks flushed rosy pink from something that looks like a combination of excitement (at the books in the archive, strangely enough, it makes him like her a lot better, just for that) and discomfort (presumably from the garments she was not used to wearing – there are moments when he catches her looking out the window and probably, wishing herself back home all over again), perfectly rouged lips pressed onto each other in concentration. She is also one of the smartest women he has ever seen, if her knowledge of the inner workings of the Imperial machine was evidence enough, and also the way how she seemed to prefer afternoons in stuffy archives poring over scrolls to other things an emperor's concubine ought to be doing like embroidering or gossiping with other females and such.

And it is that unique sense of shrewdness and humility and sincerity that draws him at once to her, and the words are out of his mouth before he could take them back – "His Majesty is very lucky to have you by his side."

Kou Shuurei smiles back, and at that moment Li Kouyuu can feel his whole life unravel all at once.

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><p><strong>just the way you are. <strong>_when you smile the whole world stops_

She is no longer the emperor's property (in hindsight, she probably never was, for it worked out in the opposite direction – it was her who marked her ownership over his heart, whether she liked it or not, like a human to an affectionate stray) when he sees her again, in her resplendent robes, not as ostentatious as the ones she wore when he first saw her, but beautiful robes, no less. Her hair is set in the same way she always does (not in that bun she wore when she was in the palace after passing the exams, which suited her but made him flush red when he realized that she wore her hair the same way he did, now), the skirts she wore trailing discreetly behind her as she made her way to the front of the hall, turning every head she passed.

He is beside the Emperor when she walks, and he can see the look of longing in the fair-haired ruler's face when he sees the girl he loves. How Ryuuki, the man who he once chided as childish and irrational, could stay in the same room as the mistress of his heart and give the edict appointing her to a far away province and not burst into tears is beyond his comprehension, but he applauds His Highness nonetheless, in some part of his mind, the one that wasn't selfishly thinking how he always liked seeing her in crimson.

When the scrolls are given, the edicts are read, the applause given and the blossoming hairpin in her hands, when all is said and done, he sees her, and she smiles at him, with familiarity and affection and all the things he used to despise on a woman's face but now has grown quite fond of seeing. She bids him hello, and he bids her farewell – ironic, isn't it? That they are able to speak like this again after they are set to walk on separate paths. He remembers the last time they meet outside the palace, the dark night, the rambunctious hoodlums, her slight frame overshadowed and overpowered by the unbecoming man in front of her, and how he had acted on pure reflex in response to the pulse that resonated through his veins and hammered in his blood, and the sound as the flower vase collided with the thick skull, victory sweet and perfect in his heart as she looked at him with nothing but trust and thankfulness, of course she would trust him, even if he was not a man worthy of her trust.

Especially when he tells her "Shuurei, that dress looks beautiful on you", and she does nothing but turn the same shade as the aforementioned garment, thinking there to be no hidden meaning to his words.

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><p><strong>beautiful monster. <strong>_you're a knife sharp and deadly_

It is him that Kurou wants her to marry and spend the rest of her life with, and that thought alone make him want to run in a corner and hide, but it is also that thought that strengthens his resolve, no matter how meager he may be to her, and how weak his resolve really is.

Her appearance in their lives is like a typhoon in the middle of the blazing summer – beautiful but deadly, wanted but dreaded. He could never imagine, in his heart of hearts, that a simple woman from the Kou clan (but of course she is not simple, she is their princess, his princess, and yet she is also the simplest woman in every way possible) could bring them all to their knees, completely and utterly destroyed and put under her spell. Her words are blunt, sharp, to the point; her temper is shifty at best (but then again, so is his); she does not act like a proper lady at all, much less like a clan's heiress or a emperor's concubine or a future empress. She is in no way the perfect lady that men his age always clamor about, and he knows it, knows that she can shatter his heart with a single move and put it back together just as easily. And surprisingly, he does not mind.

Kou Shuurei was never made to be a nightingale doomed to live and died in the most beautiful and gilded of cages, and that is something that he had known from the start. She was a phoenix, glimmering scarlet and glorious, flying across the world to touch lives with her spirit. She was never supposed to be the prisoner, looking from the inside out, and he knew all too well how to change that. However, he still knew that, legitimate his claim to her may seem (of course, for it was backed by Kou Kurou himself), he still does not have a chance.

But still, he closes his mist gray eyes and sees her face, and decides once and for all that he still does not mind.

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><p><strong>always. <strong>_these are the scars deep in your heart_

He always thought of her as a goddess, and it thrills and haunts him to know that maybe, just maybe, she is.

People were saying that she was running out of time. That she accepted His Majesty's plea to be by his side, but that she also said he take the thirteenth Ran princess as well – for Ran Shuuei's sister could bear him a heir, something that, Shuurei says, she could never provide him. It makes him happy for his friend (for, despite everything, His Majesty Shi Ryuuki would remain his friend) that he could finally win the approval of the woman he loved the most, but it makes him sad, too, though he's not sure if it's how the girl that Kouyuu also loved the most is getting married, or how she may be about to perish soon, or how she never will get to know how he feels, that makes him want to curl up into a ball and cry, like when he was but a little child.

He finds himself dreading and selfishly waiting for the inevitable, for the day that she will fall (fall like all great empires do, not like how heiresses fall; she was not but a human, but a one-woman army, and she was a force to be reckoned with, like the empires in the past), the day that her breath will halt and he will finally be free from the spell she had woven him into. But still, he knew that not even death would free him of her presence – that even if her brown eyes fell into an eternal sleep, it would not change how they were the only thing he could see when he closed his eyes. Even if her body would be six feet under, it still won't change how he'd feel her warmth hit him like a battering ram whenever he'd see something that would remind him of her, every time he ate steamed buns, stayed too long in the Imperial archives, cooked too much dim sum without knowing why. She would perish, like all other humans would, and she would be at peace – but he would live, as if nothing had changed, and he would never, ever, be at peace with himself.

Because nothing could ever change how he had a million chances to tell her he loved her, and wanted to make her his, every time she smiled at him and talked to him, before she would take His Majesty's hand and stay out of his reach forever, even in the afterlife. There would be nothing left to say when he spent every waking hour of his existence loving her ever since that fateful moment they met, and that his secret would die along with him, if he ever did, because Li Kouyuu is not supposed to love Kou Shuurei and Kou Shuurei would never fall in love with Li Kouyuu.

Despite himself, he still finds the time to send her a hair ornament, as a token of goodwill for her wedding day (a day he had no goodwill whatsoever for). She gushes and she coos and she embraces him giddily, but she would never understand, and he knows it. He knows that no matter what happens, nothing will ever change.

The hairpin in Shuurei's hands is beautiful, crystal blooms of morning glory glinting in the sunlight.

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><p><em>i am in misery there ain't nobody here to comfort me<em>

**fin.**

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><p><strong>AN: **More nonsensicality from me. Goodness, I do love crack pairs too much, now don't I? Kouyuu/Shuurei has always been a pet pair for me when I was in the SaiMono fandom three years ago, and due to some random Net searching, I remembered them again, and somehow this fic wrote itself while I was listening to obviously mismatched music.

And, as usual, I have flower themes! Morning glory = _I have loved you in vain._ Nice, Kouyuu. Real angsty of you. Also, as a random thought, I had initially thought of writing in flower motifs for all the other parts: thornless violet roses for the first one (love at first sight), dahlias for the second (elegance and dignity), and fennel for the third (strength), but I decided that I loved flower motifs too much and should cut back on them once in a while. (And also, those three flowers didn't seem to make sense to me, especially since I was writing this midnight, Philippine time.) But still, my musical themes still remain – every fic I do these days seem to be connected to some song or lyric. Even my original fiction writes that way, too – and yet I do not mind. Huh. I hope you liked it, though.

**Reviews are very much appreciated.**


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